Publications by authors named "Yusra Shawar"

Though vital to health policymaking processes, little is known about the distribution of attention to issues global health journals focus on or their alignment with commitments to health equity. We developed a new framework and methods to help address these analytical gaps. We used content analysis to systematically identify and novel methods to measure attention to themes, subthemes and geographies represented in more than 2,000 research articles published in two of the longest-running multidisciplinary global health journals, and , between 2004 and 2018.

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Learning about how to evaluate implementation-focused networks is important as they become more commonly used. This research evaluated the emergence, legitimacy and effectiveness of a multi-country Quality of Care Network (QCN) aiming to improve maternal, newborn and child health (MNCH) outcomes. We examined the QCN global level, national and local level interfaces in four case study countries.

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Background: Few low- or middle-income countries (LMICs) have prioritized the expansion of rehabilitation services. Existing scholarship has identified that problem definition, governance, and structural factors are influential in the prioritization of rehabilitation. The objective of this study was to identify the factors influencing the prioritization and implementation of rehabilitation services in Uganda.

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Article Synopsis
  • In 2017, a group called WHO started a project called QCN to help reduce deaths of mothers and newborns in hospitals by 50% by 2022.
  • The project didn't work the same way in every country, and some important things, like having enough resources, were missing to help provide good care.
  • To make the project better, it would help if each country created its own plan for improving healthcare, based on the main goals of QCN, so everyone could work together and understand their roles better.
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The Quality-of-Care Network (QCN) was conceptualized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other global partners to facilitate learning on and improve quality of care for maternal and newborn health within and across low and middle-income countries. However, there was significant variance in the speed and extent to which QCN formed in the involved countries. This paper investigates the factors that shaped QCN's differential emergence in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda.

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Introduction: The relative priority received by issues in global health agendas is subjected to impressionistic claims in the absence of objective methods of assessment of priority. To build an approach for conducting structured assessments of comparative priority health issues receive, we expand the public arenas model (2021) and offer a framework for future assessments of health issue priority in global and national health agendas.

Methods: We aimed to develop a more comprehensive set of measures for conducting multiyear priority comparisons of health issues in six agenda-setting arenas by identifying possible measures and data sources, selecting indicators based on feasibility and comparability of measures and gathering the data on selected indicators.

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The highly decentralized nature of global health governance presents significant challenges to conceptualizing and systematically measuring the agenda status of diseases, injuries, risks and other conditions contributing to the collective disease burden. An arenas model for global health agenda setting was recently proposed to help address these challenges. Further developing the model, this study aims to advance more robust inquiry into how and why priority levels may vary among the array of stakeholder arenas in which global health agenda setting occurs.

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Background: Despite a long history of political discourse around refugee integration, it wasn't until 2016 that this issue emerged as a global political priority. Limited research has examined the evolution of policies of global actors around health service provision to refugees and how refugee integration into health systems came onto the global agenda. This study seeks to fill this gap.

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Background: The prolonged presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan has highlighted the need for sustainable health service delivery models for refugees. In 2012, the Jordanian government adopted a policy that granted Syrian refugees access, free of charge, to the national health system. However since 2012, successive policy revisions have limited refugee access.

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The Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (QCN) aims to work through learning, action, leadership and accountability. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of QCN in these four areas at the global level and in four QCN countries: Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda. This mixed method evaluation comprised 2-4 iterative rounds of data collection between 2019-2022, involving stakeholder interviews, hospital observations, QCN members survey, and document review.

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The rapid spread of COVID-19 throughout the world in early 2020 created unprecedented challenges for national governments. Policies developed during the early months of the pandemic, before the first mRNA vaccines were authorized for emergency use, provide a window into national governments' prioritization of populations that were particularly vulnerable. We developed the COVID-19 Health Justice Policy Tracker to capture and categorize these policies using a health justice lens.

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The Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (QCN) is intended to facilitate learning, action, leadership and accountability for improving quality of care in member countries. This requires legitimacy-a network's right to exert power within national contexts. This is reflected, for example, in a government's buy-in and perceived ownership of the work of the network.

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Background: Tens of millions of children lack adequate care, many having been separated from or lost one or both parents. Despite the problem's severity and its impact on a child's lifelong health and wellbeing, the care of vulnerable children-which includes strengthening the care of children within families, preventing unnecessary family separation, and ensuring quality care alternatives when reunification with the biological parents is not possible or appropriate-is a low global priority. This analysis investigates factors shaping the inadequate global prioritization of the care of vulnerable children.

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The Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (QCN) was established to build a cross-country platform for joint-learning around quality improvement implementation approaches to reduce mortality. This paper describes and explores the structure of the QCN in four countries and at global level. Using Social Network Analysis (SNA), this cross-sectional study maps the QCN networks at global level and in four countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda) and assesses the interactions among actors involved.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The Quality of Care Network (QCN), launched by WHO in 2017 in 11 low- and middle-income countries, aims to enhance maternal, newborn, and child health and seeks sustainable integration into health systems.
  • - Research in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda used interviews and observations of health services to identify six critical actions for QCN sustainability, revealing strengths and vulnerabilities in each country's approach.
  • - Although financial uncertainties and lack of community ownership hinder sustainability, some aspects of QCN may persist in broader government health initiatives due to efforts to embed it within existing systems.
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Background: There is a large and growing unmet need for rehabilitation - a diverse category of services that aim to improve functioning across the life course - particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Yet despite urgent calls to increase political commitment, many low- and middle-income country governments have dedicated little attention to expanding rehabilitation services. Existing policy scholarship explains how and why health issues reach the policy agenda and offers applicable evidence to advance access to physical, medical, psychosocial, and other types of rehabilitation services.

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Recent calls for global health decolonization suggest that addressing the problems of global health may require more than 'elevating country voice'. We employed a frame analysis of the diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framings of both discourses and analyzed the implications of convergence or divergence of these frames for global health practice and scholarship. We used two major sources of data-a review of literature and in-depth interviews with actors in global health practice and shapers of discourse around elevating country voice and decolonizing global health.

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Background: 'Resilience', 'self-reliance' and 'increasing country voice' are widely used terms in global health. However, the terms are understood in diverse ways by various global health actors. We analyse how these terms are understood and why differences in understanding exist.

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Article Synopsis
  • The concept of peace-through-health shows promise in conflict areas, but its success varies due to challenges like the cooptation of health initiatives by existing power structures.
  • In the Syrian conflict, healthcare initiatives differ by level: those at state and interbelligerent levels often rely on international funding and centralized governance, making them vulnerable to political agendas, while community-level initiatives focus on basic health needs, allowing for better collaboration and reduced cooptation.
  • A pilot health initiative that emphasized community involvement demonstrated the potential for peacebuilding, indicating that community-focused health interventions may be more effective than those at higher political levels, highlighting the need for further research on their effectiveness.
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Background: Globally, 1 in 6 people aged 60 years and older experience elder abuse in the community annually, with potentially severe physical and mental health, financial, and social consequences. Yet, elder abuse remains a low global priority. We aimed to identify the factors accounting for the low global political priority of elder abuse.

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Health issues vary in the amount of attention and resources they receive from global health organisations and national governments. How issues are framed could shape differences in levels of priority. We reviewed scholarship on global health policy making to examine the role of framing in shaping global health priorities.

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Background: Child sexual abuse (CSA) is widespread. Few countries, however, prioritize the issue. The United Kingdom is an exception, ranked first in its response to the issue in a 2019 country comparison.

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